strength and fragrance; this is the color of the best people, these are the movers of movers, this is the salt of the salt of the earth"*.

Thus, by the end of his literary activity, Chernyshevsky, despite his negative attitude toward Russian society and his distrust of the activity of the popular masses, began to admit the possibility of a broad revolutionary movement, provoked by the peasantry's disillusionment with the reform of 1861. On the other hand, he could establish the existence of new people, revolutionaries from the intelligentsia, ready to stand at the head of the people in their struggle against the kingdom of exploitation and oppression...

By what path, then, was the revolutionary movement in Russia supposed to go, from Chernyshevsky's point of view?

Above (in Chapter VI) we saw that in his general political views, Chernyshevsky stood close to Blanquism—to Blanquism not in the sense which this word later acquired and continues to be used in everyday language*, but rather in the sense in which Marx understood it, when he recognized the Blanquists as true representatives of the revolutionary proletariat... The Blanquists held the point of view that a minority is strong only insofar as it truly expresses, if not the strivings, then at least the interests of the laboring majority.

From this same point of view, the only one possible for epochs characterized by the passivity of the popular masses, it appears that Chernyshevsky also proceeded. He explicitly emphasized that without the participation of the popular masses, one cannot achieve serious practical results; he said that only the sympathy of the broad masses can ensure the success of one or another political program, and that without arousing enthusiasm in the masses, revolutionary

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* It is believed that in the figure of Rakhmetov, Chernyshevsky portrayed a certain Bakhmeteev, whom Herzen ("The Common Fund." Collection of posthumous articles. Geneva, 1874, p. 181 et seq.) depicted in a completely different manner. Herzen met him in London in 1858: approximately at this time Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky's novel goes abroad. In our author's work, Rakhmetov abroad appears before Feuerbach in order to offer him money for the publication of his works (incidentally, this once again shows how highly Chernyshevsky valued Feuerbach, "the greatest of European thinkers of the nineteenth century, the father of the new philosophy." "What is to be Done?", l. c., 194); Bakhmeteev, on the other hand, came to London to Herzen in order to offer him part of his capital for the affairs of Russian propaganda.

Here is how Herzen describes Bakhmeteev:

"A young man with the appearance of a cadet, shy, very cheerless and with a particular exterior, rather crudely finished off, like seventh or eighth sons of steppe landowners. Very taciturn, he was almost silent the whole time; it was evident that something was on his mind, but he had not reached the possibility of expressing anything.

I left, inviting him to dine in a few days. Before that I met him on the street.

'May I walk with you?' he asked.

'Of course, it is not dangerous for me with you, but for you with me. But London is big.'

'I am not afraid,' and suddenly, seizing the bit, he spoke rapidly: 'I shall never return to Russia, no, no, I shall absolutely not return to Russia...'

'But you are so young.'

'I love Russia, I love it very much; but the people there... I cannot live there. I want to establish a colony on completely social foundations; I have thought it all through, and now I am going straight there.'

'That is, where?'

'To the Marquesas Islands.'

Of the 50,000 francs he had, Bakhmeteev took 30,000 with him to the Marquesas Islands, tying them in a handkerchief "as one ties up a pound of gooseberries or nuts," and left 20,000 to Herzen for the affairs of propaganda: this was the "common fund," which later caused so much discord among Russian émigrés. The subsequent fate of Bakhmeteev is completely unknown; he disappeared without a trace. In Herzen's depiction, he comes across as some sort of loose cannon, almost a half-wit eccentric, bearing very little resemblance to the formidable and stern figure of Rakhmetov. But one must say: Herzen was organically incapable of understanding Russian revolutionaries of that time; it was on this ground that all those misunderstandings occurred which poisoned the last days of his life. If Herzen could so falsely understand the writers Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, what is surprising if he completely failed to understand the angular and stern representative of revolutionary youth? But on the other hand, it is quite possible that one of two other suppositions is true: either Bakhmeteev did not serve as a prototype for Rakhmetov at all, or Chernyshevsky greatly idealized him, creating an image having nothing in common with the original, or combining in it traits from the character of Dobrolyubov (the stern sense of civic duty), Bakunin (travels through Slavic lands, cf. also Kelsiеv), Serakovsky (rapprochement with all classes), etc.

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* An example of such superficial understanding of Blanquism is afforded by Mr. Nikolayev's reasoning about Chernyshevsky's political views. Having recounted his conversation with Chernyshevsky in hard labor, during which Nikolai Gavrilovich expressed the idea that it would have been much better if during the peasant reform the openly serf-owning party of the nobility had won and the peasants had been freed without land, for then an immediate catastrophe would have occurred, Mr. Nikolayev concludes: "Here, you see, is pure Blanquism: the worse, the better (!). This does not at all resemble the later theories of our homegrown Marxists (who, by the way, gentlemen like the Nikolayevs in their time precisely attributed to them the principle 'the worse, the better' and precisely accused them of sympathy for the landlessness of the peasantry. - Yu. S.). Not evolution, not gradual liberation of peasants from the means of production, not stewing the peasant in the factory cauldron, not his gradual transformation into a landless laborer, but complete and instantaneous dispossession. Not evolution, to which, I repeat, N. G. regarded with indignation (?), but catastrophe. Not Marxism, but Blanquism" ("Personal Reminiscences," 21-22). — Needless to say, a fine impression of Chernyshevsky's views can be obtained from such a tirade!

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